


The Mind Is More Than The Person Who Holds It Appears

by HK44



Series: Brokes, Pennsylvania [9]
Category: Original Work
Genre: Asexual Character, Family, Fluff, Sort of anyway, Telepathy, and john should really worry less, minds, robert should probably slow down
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-06-30
Updated: 2015-06-30
Packaged: 2018-04-07 00:24:59
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,511
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4242447
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HK44/pseuds/HK44
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>John and Robert learn some things about each other and Elizabeth spends most of her week laughing.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Mind Is More Than The Person Who Holds It Appears

It’s nothing like what John was expecting.

He’d been expecting loudness and numbers and mathematical equations and science and just pure over thinking of everything. He figured there’d be tidbits of Marvel, filled with an unhealthy obsession with Iron Man, mixed with the desperation for a suit of his own and an undying love for that shiny, metal thing. He thought there would be explosions of colour and mechanical parts and machinery and ideas so overwhelming and detailed he wouldn’t understand a thing. He believed that it’d be extremely focused, possessed to the max with details and perfection.

Instead there wasn’t any of that.

Weirdly, Robert’s mind was quiet. Every so often there’d be a sudden thought and eventually that would slide away into nothing, his mind slow and loose as he prodded Tony’s mechanics, idly thinking _‘Hey, I wonder if Ben’s arm is still acting up’, ‘Tony’s coding needs to be repaired. He keeps running into walls and he hasn’t peed in a week’, ‘I need to put in the cake order for Amai’s birthday party. Chocolate frosting, strawberry cake, no sprinkles. She’s iffy about sprinkles’_ and _‘Did Elizabeth eat this morning? She looked hungry. Maybe I should make her a sandwich and get Tony to deliver it. She always finds that cute’._

John never thought that Robert would be this open to everything and everybody’s little quirks, multitasking, mind divided yet concentrated, preoccupied with making sure everyone else is okay. He almost burned his arm to nothing but charred flesh, he was so unfocused on himself.

It was random. Robert'd be thinking intensely on one thing and thinking intensely of something entirely unrelated at the same time with four or five other thoughts tinkering at the back of his mind, there but not there.

Schematics of things fluttered past and for the first time, John sort of understood the mechanical babble that fluttered by in Robert's mind, words encased by definitions and _'Oh, crabapples, that wouldn't work. Maybe if I did this...'_.

Roberts fingers tapped against the side of his table as he pondered the blueprints of a shower, beating out, in what use to be such an disassociating pattern but what John now gets is Morse Code, silent messages to no one and everyone.

Despite the vastness, it's overwhelmingly bizarre how easily understandable Robert's mind was. As an experiment, John, propped up against the doorway, languidly dragging his thumb over the wrapping of a stick of gum, asked, "Rob, do you want to get ice cream?"

There's a moment of silence, his mind flickering off, shutting down and rebooting, sliding over John's question, practically soaking the words in like a sponge, everything else rolling to the back, then, _'I could go for ice cream but I have a lot of stuff to do.'_

Instead of just saying that, Robert babbled, "I gotta fix Tony's leg before I fix the oven on the third floor but before that I have to order Amai's cake - strawberry cake, chocolate icing, no sprinkles, thirty-five candles - then after that I have to consider some stuff Ben sent over then make pies because Fish is coming over to pick up Tony 'cause I don't have time to walk him today, it's not in my schedule, and, of course, Elizabeth has some girl movie she wants to watch but I want to watch Iron Man 2 again so I've scheduled in some time for us arguing but before any of that I have to fix the oven on the third floor because that's the only oven I'm allowed to use because I still have to make the pie for Fish and the pies for movie night but only after I fix Tony's leg which I can't do until I figure out this scanning shower thing I've been thinking about since last week Thursday."

John blinked. He shoved his stick of gum into his mouth along with the three other sticks already there, peeling the wrapper off another one. If he hadn't been in Robert's head, he wouldn't have noticed the frown that slid over his face for half a second, mind falling into abyss of misery because communication _'is hard and sucks and words are stupid'_.

So he bundled up his sleeves and glanced over at Tony, nonchalantly muttering through a mouthful of gum, "I'll bring you some then."

_'Thanks.'_

"Okay but you're gonna have to do it at twelve 'cause I'm taking a three minute lunch break at one and I only really like ice cream as soup and Tony's gonna get me a sandwich at twelve fifteen 'cause that's when Lizzie makes sandwiches for her daily bulk up and flirting session with that girl from your math class that she likes a lot and I love Lizzie's sandwiches."

John grinned, finally understanding. "Okay. See you at twelve then."

Robert rolled his pencil in his hand, mind partly gone, partly focused on John's leaning form, angles and diagrams whooshing past in equations and simplicity. "'Kay."

\- - -

Robert’s disturbed by John.

John's mind was a sea of worry, pulling in more debris than it pulled out and that was disturbing.

When he wasn't daydreaming about fully clothed women, he was worrying, incessantly and obsessively about every little thing. When he hacked in John's medical files, he was slightly put off by the fact that John hadn't been diagnosed with at least some kind of anxiety disorder.

Seriously. It was weird. John had panic attacks the moment anyone walked into a room with a minor cut or with a distant or sad look on their face. He jumped to conclusions, spanning out into _'Oh my god, are they okay? Crap, did something happen? Is it me? Is it them? My mom died. Robert got hit by a car. Tony malfunctioned and blew up in Elizabeth's room and now that pink rug she spent three hours considering is destroyed. Bloody hell, I'm gonna have to buy her one. But what if it's not the rug and it's something I've never seen before.'_ And from there it just continues.

He's not as open and multitasking as Robert had once believed. Instead, John's a worrywart, meticulously focusing on one tiny thing but blowing it up in proportion so wide it's bigger than the dang multiverse.

John moved from topic to topic to topic with no in between, exploding each worry into the size of a whale before mentally caving in and bringing about another topic that just grew bigger and bigger the more he was alone.

Robert, so badly, wanted to drag John to one of his therapy sessions and get him a diagnosis because there was no way John didn't have some disorder, anxiety or not.

Still, Robert couldn't help but find John's mind a little exciting, with its sudden burst of colours, electricity coursing through, bringing everything to life because John is hypersensitive to everything, noticing texture and colour and taste and smell and just utterly overwhelming all Robert's senses in one giant go, he has to sit and stop to calm down.

When he's not freaking out about every tiny thing, John was a nice escape from the languidness of Robert's head. Colours Robert's never even heard of riveted around his mind and he looked at his plans, finding an interest in making them _'ebony and fuchsia and camel and arsenic and jade'_ , so colourful and not drab, investing in building colourful painting devices and assigning each a different colour, giving them their own mind and choice, modeling it after John because he knows and gets colour and its nice to not see the world in black and white and pink for once.

He started buying candy and noting each and every shade and difference in colour, colour coding them in plastic bags and hiding them in various places in John's bedroom to match each shirt he wore each day, expanding from red to carmine and rose and ruby, from green to olive and jade and emerald, from blue to aqua and turquoise and aero and so on and so on, and for once he gets the hype when John gets excited by each new flavor of lollipops and gum that is released from Ms. Jolly's Delicious Candy Stop, because everything is different and the same and it's _interesting_.

\- - -

Elizabeth sat back and grinned to herself, because curses are nice when she's not too involved in them. She was pleased to see John understand her brother a little bit better than just assuming Robert's a nutjob with an affinity for mechanics and pleased to see Robert realize that machines aren't everything and John's not as perfect as he pretends to be.

She rubbed her hands together and listened to _'Maybe I should change that to 10 centimeters'_ and _'EW! WHY IS SHE NAKED? MY GOD! CHANGE THE CHANNEL YOU BLOODY MORON!'_ and laughed under her breath.

Amai raised an eye. "Something interestin', Elizabeth?"

Elizabeth shook her head and watched colours explode and ideas grow bigger and everything fall into place and just smiled lightly. "Just my boys."

**Author's Note:**

> I'll work on the title later and I'm horrible at writing British slang.


End file.
